Jilly Cooper

Dame Jilly Cooper (born Jill Sallitt; 21 February 1937 – 5 October 2025) was an English author and journalist, best known for her long-running Rutshire Chronicles series. She began her career in journalism and published several works of non-fiction, including books on class, animals and marriage, before turning to fiction. Her first book was How to Stay Married, which was published in 1969. She published several collections of journalism, alongside other non-fiction volumes throughout much of her career. Cooper's first novel to be published was the romance Emily, which appeared in 1975 and was followed by five more, as well as a volume of short stories. Cooper was also an anthologist and wrote the Little Mabel series of children's books.

Cooper went on to become a prominent figure in British popular literature, noted for her witty social commentary and depictions of upper-middle-class life. Her best-known works are the Rutshire Chronicles of which the 1985 novel Riders was the first; it was followed by ten more volumes with the latest installment Tackle! published in 2023. The series is known for its humour, sexuality and depictions of upper-class life; several of the volumes feature the character Rupert Campbell-Black as a key protagonist. Whilst Riders alone sold over one million copies, and her romance novels were compared to those of Nancy Mitford and Barbara Cartland, not all reviews were positive. Private Eye lampooned Cooper and gave her the nickname "Super Cooper", which she later used as a title for one of her own books. Nevertheless, Cooper is recognised as one of the key writers of the bonkbuster novel, along with Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran and Judith Krantz. Whilst few academics have analysed her work, those that have recognise her ability to portray a large cast of characters and her focus on pleasure as a literary theme. Academic Ian Patterson compared her to Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens.

In 2025, the Jilly Cooper Prize was established as part of the Comedy Women in Print Awards to honour her contribution to comic fiction. After Cooper's death in the same year, Queen Camilla described her as a "wonderfully witty and compassionate friend". Cooper had received several honours during her lifetime, including that of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to literature and charity. Several of her works were adapted for television and radio, including the second Rutshire Chronicles volume, Rivals, which was adapted by Disney+ and released in 2024. It starred David Tennant and Aidan Turner.

Early life

Jill Sallitt was born in Hornchurch, Essex, on 21 February 1937 to Mary Elaine (née Whincup) and Brigadier W. B. Sallitt. She grew up in Ilkley, Yorkshire, and in Surrey. Cooper was educated at Moorfield School in Ilkley and Godolphin School in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She subsequently learnt to type in Oxford.

Journalism and non-fiction

Aged 20, Cooper became a junior reporter for The Middlesex Independent, based in Brentford. She worked for the paper from 1957 to 1959. Subsequently, she worked as an account executive, copywriter, publisher's reader and receptionist. Her break came with a chance meeting at a dinner party with Godfrey Smith, the editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, who asked her to write a feature about her experiences as a young married woman. This led to a column in which Cooper wrote about marriage, sex and housework. That column ran from 1969 to 1982, when she moved to The Mail on Sunday, where she worked as a columnist for a further five years.

In parallel to her journalism, Cooper wrote several humorous and satirical books: her earliest columns led to the publication of her first book, the satirical How to Stay Married, in 1969, which was quickly followed by another satirical guide to working life, How to Survive from Nine to Five, in 1970. Further satirical works were Men and Super Men, published in 1972, and Women and Super Women, published in 1974. The former has mixed reviews, with the Liverpool Daily Post describing the puns as bad, but that Cooper's writing had a "knowing adolescence". In contrast the Evening Dispatch instructed all its readers to immediately buy it, as a guide to "men and sex". Women and Super Women was reviewed positively by Clive James in The Observer, whereas other reviews described the book as cruel (if funny) in its discussions of a wide range of women.

Cooper's journalism was first collected into a single volume, Jolly Super, in 1971. That collection took its title from the nickname given to Cooper by Private Eye. A further collection Jolly Super Too was published in 1973. The Birmingham Evening Mail compared Cooper to Mick McManus as someone the public loved to hate, and stated that the book would deliver "a snigger a minute" to readers. Jolly Superlative was published in 1975 and largely included pieces from The Sunday Times, but also Vogue, and was praised by The Daily Telegraph for its "limitless comic invention". In 1977 another collection of journalism, Super Jilly, was reviewed by Clive James in The Observer as "another breathless year-book by the Sunday Times' head-girl". The same year How to Stay Married and How to Survive from Nine to Five were republished together in a single volume in 1977 under the revised title How To Survive Work and Wedlock. The combined volume had mixed reviews from "saucy, but relevant" according to the Sydney Morning Herald, to the Evening Standard describing how "Women's Lib must hate her insouciant approach to the woman's world".

The theme of class dominated much of her writing and her non-fiction with her work written from an explicitly upper-middle-class British perspective, with emphasis on the relationships between men and women and matters of social class in contemporary Britain. Upon the publication of 1979's book Class, Ralf Dahrendorf reviewed it for the London Review of Books, describing the work as one where "the characters are fun, the observations acute". Published in 2000 David Cannadine's Class in Britain assessed Cooper's book, pointing out that Cooper herself had felt that it did not fully describe the intricacies of the British class system.

Another republication during this period was 1980's Super Cooper, which was a volume of excerpts from her earlier books Men and Super Men and Women and Super Women. This was described the Sydney Morning Herald as a "brilliant guide to the sexes" and by the Liverpool as a volume "that never disappoints the reader". Jolly Marsupial another volume of journalism, this time focussing on Cooper's 1980 tour of Australia to promote the book Class, was published in 1982.

In 1981 Cooper published Intelligent and Loyal, which is a book about mongrels. In it Cooper created her own humorous typology for mongrels. To gather stories about mongrels for the book, Cooper put an advert in newspapers asking people to share stories about their pets for the book. As a result of the book's success Cooper and her dogs subsequently made public appearances, including on The Animals Roadshow in 1989. In 1983 she published Animals in War, a book that recorded the contributions a variety of species made to the military. Public response to the book led to a campaign, supported by Cooper, to establish the Animals in War Memorial.

Cooper edited an anthology of prose and poetry entitled The British in Love. With Tom Hartman she also co-edited a dictionary of quotations purely sourced from women entitled Violets and Vinegar. In 2020, some of her writings on sex and marriage from the 1970s were republished as Between the Covers and praised for their honesty.

Fiction

Cooper has been described as "the queen of the bonkbuster"; however, her first novels were romances. These were followed by the Rutshire Chronicles series, where dogs and horses featured heavily. Cooper described the research she undertook for each novel as "like studying for an A-level". Quoted in the Evening Standard in 1994, Cooper stated that she thought that product placement in literary works was acceptable and discussed how she had received thank you gifts as a result of unsolicited mentions in her novels.

Romantic novels series

Cooper was encouraged to write romantic fiction by the editor Desmond Elliott, who had read the short stories she had written previously for teenage magazines. At the time she was working in publicity for HarperCollins; Elliott commissioned her with a six-book contract and the paperback rights were subsequently sold to Corgi Books. The series sold in the 100,000s. The contract was for Cooper to publish a novel every six months.